Accessibility Strategy and Architecture

In the last month, IBM and Sun have come together on their efforts to make Firefox accessible on Linux. Solid communication between Sun and IBM facilitates the separate teams working as one large extended team with a agreed upon schedule. The following are the team makeups:

IBM Team:

Aaron Leventhal, Firefox accessibility lead (Arlington, MA)

Ming Gao, developer (Beijing, China)

Eirikur Hallgrimsson, developer (Nashua, NH)

Dan Kinnunen, tester (Austin, TX)

Wayne Deangelo, tester (Austin, TX)

Mark Pilgrim, Firefox UI accessibility (Raleigh, NC)

Sun Team:

Ginn Chen, Firefox ATK, Sun lead (Beijing)

Evan Yan, developer (Beijing)

Neo Liu, developer, (Beijing)

Tim Miao, developer (Beijing)

Mozilla is also kicking in resources to address cross-platform issues such as keyboard navigation in and out of plugins as well as investigating cross-platform accessibility support which incudes Mac OS X and ATK.

What is important is this is a team effort between IBM, Sun, and Mozilla. The companies are setting aside corporate barriers to accelerate accessibility of an open source browser and operating system. This speaks volumes about the benefits of open source development.